Goodbye to All That: The State of My Personal Field of Schizoid Anglo-Saxon Studies

Eileen A. Joy

**this is a copy of an essay that will be appearing in The Heroic Age, Issue 11 (Summer 2007)

This will no doubt be like a profession of faith: the profession of faith of a professor who would act as if he were nevertheless asking your permission to be unfaithful or a traitor to his habitual practice.
—Jacques Derrida, “The University Without Condition”

A discipline is not the sum total of all the truths that may be uttered concerning something; it is not even the total of all that may be accepted, by virtue of some principle of coherence and systematization, concerning some given fact or proposition. . . . Within its own limits, every discipline recognizes true and false propositions, but it repulses a whole teratology of learning.
—Michel Foucault, “The Discourse on Language”

It is only the category of multiplicity, used as a substantive and going beyond both the One and the many, beyond the predicative relation of the One and the many, that can account for desiring-production: desiring-production is pure multiplicity, that is to say, an affirmation that is irreducible to any sort of unity.
—Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

* * *

In the eponymous clinical tale of his book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, the neurologist Oliver Sacks details the case of “Dr. P,” a music teacher, who suffers from visual agnosia. In Sacks’s terms, “he construed the world as a computer construes it, by means of key features and schematic relationships” (Sacks 1987, 15). When Sacks asks him to look at pictures in an issue of National Geographic Magazine, a “striking brightness, a color, a shape would arrest his attention and elicit comment—but in no case did he get the scene-as-a-whole. . . . He never entered into a relation with the picture as a whole—never faced, so to speak, its physiognomy. He had no sense whatever of a landscape or a scene” (Sacks 1987, 10-11). Although Dr. P was apparently a brilliant musician and teacher of music (as Sacks puts it, “his temporal lobes were obviously intact: he had a wonderful musical cortex”), something was wrong with his visual processing. When shown photographs of family and friends, while he could pick out facial features, such as a nose or moustache, for the most part “he recognized nobody: neither his family, nor his colleagues, nor his pupils, nor himself,” and he “approached these faces—even of those near and dear—as if they were abstract puzzles or tests. He did not relate to them; he did not behold. No face was familiar to him, seen as a ‘thou,’ being just identified as a set of features, an ‘it.’ Thus, there was formal, but no trace of personal gnosis. And with this went his indifference, or blindness, to expression” (Sacks 1987, 12, 13). Ultimately, although Dr. P had “wholly lost the world as representation,” he somehow “wholly preserved it as music” (Sacks 1987, 18). Indeed, when he hummed to himself, he was better able to navigate his daily world of persons, places, and objects. For Sacks, “the brain is a machine and a computer,” but “our mental processes, which constitute our being and life, are not just abstract and mechanical, but personal as well—and, as such, involve not just classifying and categorizing, but continual judging and feeling as well.” In Sacks’s view, the case of Dr. P is both a “parable” and a “warning” for cognitive science: “of what happens to a science that eschews the judgmental, the particular, the personal, and becomes entirely abstract and computational” (Sacks 1987, 20).

I have not thought of Sacks’s book since 1987, when I first read it, but it immediately came to mind (no pun intended) after an exchange in winter 2006-07 between some commentators on various medieval studies weblogs regarding the state of the field of Old English (or, Anglo-Saxon) studies, in which exchange certain laments (not new by any means) were voiced regarding the endangerment of Old English, or more broadly, Anglo-Saxon studies. This discussion (which was really, we must remember, an informal, if serious conversation between bloggers) admirably took up various threads and aspects of the field in a manner that suggested (to me, anyway) that the commentators understand that Anglo-Saxon studies address a richly complex set of interdisciplinary concerns and can never be reduced to some species of philology or language study only; nevertheless, the predominant notes being struck in the various posts seemed to coalesce around the idea that Anglo-Saxon studies represents an area of productive resistance to the usual business of most English departments, and is in danger primarily because it has been forgetting or neglecting that we know how the English language (and maybe language in general) works better than our English department colleagues who work in other, more modern fields. Further, philology, especially of a certain historicist bent, represents an order of knowledge with powerful explanatory power—“English with right and wrong answers,” thanks to venerable verities like Grimm’s and Verner’s laws—so much so that it is capable of exposing the lie of the postmodern caveat that all knowledge is contingent and situated, a caveat, according to Michael Drout, that no one outside of Humanities believes, “except in the most pathetic, freshman-philosophy sense” (Drout 2007a). In other words, the health of the field of Anglo-Saxon studies will partly depend on our asserting more forcefully that most work that goes under the banner of “poststructural theory” or “postmodernism” is fairly suspect and easily refutable because its practitioners don’t understand how language works. At the same time, by turning more of our attention to both the scholarship and teaching of language (especially with a better understanding of historic, synchronic, cognitive, etc. linguistics) as well as to the history of the material conditions of textual production, we can better demonstrate the value of our studies in the more practical terms the “real world” (in the form of university administrators, legislators, and conservative critics of higher education) supposedly understand.

But what if no one in an English department except the medievalists—and especially the Anglo-Saxonists—cares about, or pays attention, to what early medievalists might have to say about postmodernism or language studies? Richard Scott Nokes puts the matter succinctly (for him, anyway) when he writes, “20th[-] Century Americanists can read and understand the work of 18th[-Century] British scholars, who can read and understand the work of film scholars, but unless they can read Old English or Old Norse, or medieval Latin, or Old Whatever, there will always be a barrier between us and them. We can understand them, but they can’t understand us” [Nokes 2007b]. In the remainder of my essay here, I will try to work out what I see as the disciplinary agnosia of these arguments—a disciplinary agnosia, moreover, that shares something with Dr. P’s recollection of his reading of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina: he “had an undiminished grasp of the plot, but completely omitted visual characteristics, visual narrative, and scenes. He remembered the words of the characters but not their faces; and though, when asked, he could quote, with his remarkable and almost verbatim memory, the original visual descriptions, these were, it became apparent, quite empty for him and lacked sensorial, imaginal, or emotional reality. Thus, there was an internal agnosia as well” (Sacks 1987, 15-16). I want to see, further, if it might be possible to imagine a radically schizoid future for Anglo-Saxon studies, one in which the continued health of the more broad humanities and not just the study of one segment of the past would be our chief concern, and where it would actually be a priority to do the very thing Nokes thinks might be impossible: communicate what we do to a broader audience in a manner that demonstrates our important relevance within the postmodern (and even, posthistorical) university. My use of the term “schizoid” is a deliberate appropriation of the thought of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, where they argue for a schizophrenic process of desire that is always lighting out for the territories elsewhere other than the more Oedipalized realms of Family, Church, Nation, etc. My idea here is that Anglo-Saxon studies is deeply Oedipalized in terms of its fixation on fatherly tradition(s), and could benefit from what Deleuze and Guattari called a “desiring-revolution,” one that would maximize, in the words of Ivan Illich, “personal energy under personal control” (Illich 1973, 13).

Michael Drout initiated the original discussion when, in a post on his weblog Wormtalk and Slugspeak, “State of the Field,” he explained that, while different commentators will argue, differently, that Old English studies has either become increasingly marginalized or has never been in better shape,[1] his “gut feeling” is that, “although the free-fall may have stopped, and although in some ways we are positioned very well, there is still a lot of trouble in Old English studies and in the related Old Norse studies,” at least in the American university (Drout 2006). Drout’s stated intention in his initial post was to work toward pulling together some data that might support his “gut feeling” regarding this state of affairs, and to revisit the question multiple times over a period of time, but he threw out as a first consideration that it is getting harder and harder for beginning researchers to get their hands on essential research tools, such as dictionaries and catalogs of manuscripts, that are either out of print or difficult to get (money-wise), although one of Drout’s specific examples is the Cleasby-Vigfusson Old Norse/English dictionary, which is available online.[2] I might add briefly, too, that I do not know when it has not been difficult to get one’s hands on certain items such as dictionaries, catalogs, and even the primary original manuscripts of our studies (at the very least, from a cost-time-travel perspective), and in my own experience, as someone who has never worked at an institution with a major research library, online and electronic resources, such as Kevin Kiernan et al.’s Electronic Beowulf, the University of Toronto’s Dictionary of Old English project, and the several free online versions of the Bosworth-Toller and other dictionaries, have been immensely helpful. While expensive in some instances (and obviously free in others), I would say the research tools for Old English studies are more accessible than ever, and to more students and scholars. And with the fourth edition of Klaber’s Beowulf on the horizon, the recent announcement of the Reprints Series from the Richard Rawlinson Center for Anglo-Saxon and Manuscript Research, Martin Foys’s current collaboration with Asa Simon Mittman to produce an electronic edition of early medieval maps, and a steady flow of books coming out from Arizona’s Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, such as John Niles’s recent Beowulf and Lejre, which provides an English translation of Tom Christensen's 1991 monograph Lejre—Syn og Sagn, I have found that the times are very good for accessibility to research aids. I will warrant that Drout is right that it should not be so difficult to get one’s hands on a copy of Ker’s Catalogue of Manuscripts Containing Anglo-Saxon, but I also believe it is just a matter of time before this, too, is available in digitized form. Drout, with his audiobook  project “Anglo-Saxon Aloud: A Daily Reading of the Entire Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records” (available in podcast form, no less) and in the project he is developing with a computer scientist colleague of his at Wheaton College to create graphic displays of the material relationships within early medieval manuscripts, is himself a beautifully creative (and generous) innovator of just the type of projects that make our studies more accessible to more persons and that also create new avenues for cultural-materialist approaches to manuscript research.[3]

Before Drout returned to his subject in a subsequent blog post, Tirincula (a pseudonym for a professor of Old English studies working, I assume, at a university somewhere in the United States) responded to Drout’s original post, “State of the Field,” by painting a somewhat more positive portrait of the field as a sociable and accommodating “little world” with “fluid borders”:

Since Anglo-Saxonists are accustomed to working in interdisciplinary environments, the field’s intellectual community readily encompasses those whose primary focus is Scandinavia, the Celtic world, Latin, etc. etc. Moreover, a lot of exciting work is being done these days by Anglo-Saxonists reaching across the boundaries of the Conquest—not caving to institutional pressure to focus on the high Middle Ages, but rather bringing the training, concerns, and interests of early medievalists to bear on the eleventh and twelfth centuries. (Tirincula 2007)

Further, the “temporal, geographical, and linguistic flexibility of early medievalists, and particularly Anglo-Saxonists and their near relations, means that scholars of the period have a lot of flexibility as they develop their research agendas beyond the starting points of their first projects” (Tirincula 2007). Ultimately, in Tirincula’s mind, Anglo-Saxon studies is a “counterculture,” in which we “do work that defies a neat mapping onto the normal disciplinary divisions of the university,” and therefore, “the community of Anglo-Saxonists offers its members an alternative to and refuge from those divisions” (Tirincula 2007).[4] A “profusion of kinds of scholarly community is a healthy thing,” but it’s also important, Tirincula believes, to not react the way other marginalized fields have “by strictly enforcing the kind of credentials that gain one entry to a career, the kind of department in which it is appropriate to work, the canon it’s appropriate to study, the chronological boundaries of appropriate enquiry, and the internal status system of the discipline,” such that there is less support for “new and adventurous work” (Tirincula 2007).

Tirincula’s characterization and even hope for the field in her post, as well as her cautions against the policing of disciplinary borders, are eminently smart and reasonable, but her faith in the “fluid borders” and disciplinary “flexibility” of Anglo-Saxonists gives me some pause. While I agree that, for the most part, Anglo-Saxon studies is a fairly collegial and friendly place (and I have personally benefited enormously from the mentorship of some very traditional and not-so-traditional figures in the field), it is also sometimes too much of that “little” Tirincula refers to as our world. To say that leaping into the eleventh and twelfth centuries indicates our willingness to cross boundaries falls altogether too short, in my opinion. If “breaking into” the eleventh and twelfth centuries is our current radical move, and from a lot of what I have read and heard lately,[5] it certainly seems to be, then while I might celebrate (and I do), I also want more, much more. Of course, on one level, I think it is critically important that scholars on both sides of the Old English-Middle English divide begin the work of dismantling this somewhat arbitrary and ultimately mutable border of the various “beyonds,” to crib from Homi Bhaba,[6] in much the same way scholars working in the later Middle Ages have been productively calling into question the boundaries that supposedly neatly divide the medieval, or premodern, from the early modern and the modern.[7] Likewise, some very interesting work has been afoot for a while now in Anglo-Saxon studies that decenters and displaces the traditional boundaries between pre- and post-Roman Britain.[8]

At the same time, it distresses me somewhat how often Anglo-Saxon studies don’t show up at all or only as a “party of one” in the collaborative efforts to redefine the parameters—historical, theoretical, and otherwise—of medieval studies, such as has been the case with what I believe are some of the most significant publications in this vein: Louise Fradenburg and Carla Freccero’s Premodern Sexualities; Glenn Burger and Steven Kruger’s Queering the Middle Ages; Karma Lochrie, Peggy McCracken, and James Schultz’s Constructing Medieval Sexuality; Patricia Clare Ingham and Michelle Warren’s Postcolonial Moves: Medieval through Modern; Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s The Postcolonial Middle Ages; Francesca Sautman and Pamela Sheingorn’s Same Sex Love and Desire Among Women in the Middle Ages; Bruce Holsinger and Ethan Knapp’s “The Marxist Premodern”; and Jennifer Summit and David Wallace’s “Medieval/Renaissance: After Periodization.”[9] There are some exceptions, such as Speaking Two Languages: Traditional Disciplines and Contemporary Theory in Medieval Studies, edited by Allen Frantzen; the special issue of the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies devoted to “Gender and Empire,” co-edited by Clare Lees and Gillian Overing; Medieval Masculinities: Regarding Men in the Middle Ages, co-edited by Thelma Fenster, Lees, and Jo Ann McNamara; Class and Gender in Early English Literature: Intersections, co-edited by Britton Harwood and Overing; Gender in Debate from the Early Middle Ages to the Renaissance, co-edited by Fenster and Lees; Gender and Difference in the Middle Ages, co-edited by Sharon Farmer and Carol Braun Pasternack; not to mention the volume co-edited by Ananya Jahanara Kabir and Deanne Williams, Postcolonial Approaches to the European Middle Ages, which includes three chapters by Anglo-Saxonists (see footnote 8). But it is clear, too, from the foregoing list, that when Anglo-Saxonists lead collaborative projects with scholars working in later medieval periods, that it is a small group of women—primarily, Lees, Overing, and Pasternack—who have done, essentially, most of the heavy lifting. It is worth noting in this respect, as well, that in Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe’s Reading Old English Texts, an anthology of essays by Anglo-Saxonists that surveys the most current approaches to the study of Old English literature as of 1997, the chapters on feminist and poststructural approaches were written by Lees and Pasternack, respectively.

I am also concerned at how often reviews or surveys of significant current (or, postmodern) work in the field of medieval studies often elide the very important groundbreaking work in Anglo-Saxon studies that, for whatever reasons, is not tallied along with everything else (and which only adds to the perpetual sting of Anglo-Saxon England being omitted entirely from David Wallace’s Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, which begins “after the Norman Conquest,” albeit there is a chapter on the “afterlife” of Old English by Seth Lerer). Therefore, in Stephen Nichols’s 2005 essay for PMLA, “Writing the New Middle Ages,” which purports to review the postmodern innovations of a newly interdisciplinary medieval literary studies that “has succeeded in breaching the ramparts that traditionally divided the field into a series of vigorously defended fiefs” (Nichols 2005, 422), out of over 130 texts listed in the bibliography (mainly covering works published from the mid-1990s through 2003), only four books by Anglo-Saxonists are listed: Catherine Karkov’s Text and Picture in Anglo-Saxon England: Narrative Strategies in the Junius 11 Manuscript, Andy Orchard’s Pride and Prodigies: Studies in the Monsters of the Beowulf-Manuscript, Peter Dendle’s Satan Unbound: The Devil in Old English Narrative Literature, and the edited volume by Benjamin Withers and Jonathan Wilcox, Naked before God: Uncovering the Body in Anglo-Saxon England. While I know it might be considered impolitic to say so, only one of the aforementioned books, and only in some of its parts, can be properly called “newly” interdisciplinary or postmodern (the Withers and Wilcox volume)—all are excellent studies (I own each one of them and have regularly poached teaching and research materials from two of them), but as a group, they cannot be argued to have strayed too far from fairly traditional critical paradigms. Which is not to say that these paradigms have somehow been exhausted—they have not been, and indeed my own attraction to the field is partly grounded in a fierce admiration of its rigorous erudition and deeply historicist and language-based approaches, but I simply want there to be more elbow room for other approaches to emerge alongside (not in place) of these (and I can’t help but feel that in subtle and not so subtle ways, as a group, we do often discourage and disparage these other approaches).

Equally dismaying is the recent review article by Tara Williams, “Fragments and Foundations: Medieval Texts and the Future of Feminism,” in which article Williams “examines the development of feminist criticism and gender studies within medieval literary studies and the limited impact that feminist treatments of texts from the Middle Ages have had on the field of feminist theory and criticism more generally” (Williams 2007, 1003). After making the statement that, “[d]espite the excellent work that has been done on non- and less canonical writers, Chaucer has remained the pivotal figure for feminism in medieval studies,” Williams relegates to a footnote that “[t]his focus overlooks the field of Anglo Saxon studies, which is outside the scope of this article, but includes works like Gillian Overing’s Language, Sign, and Gender in Beowulf” (Williams 2007, 1006, 1014). But why Anglo-Saxon studies (especially the collaborative work of Lees and Overing) are outside the focus of an essay that purports to provide an historical overview of feminist medieval studies as well as chart avenues for new directions in those studies is not entirely clear.[10] But in a manner that is unfortunate, overviews of scholarship such as these would seem to “put paid” to the idea expressed by Lees and Overing, in their essay “Before History, Before Difference,” that the Anglo-Saxon period is often viewed by scholars working in other fields as “emphatically pre-historical—at the origin, though not at the beginning,” and whether “from simple ignorance of this earlier period or for reasons largely unconscious and/or disciplinary, debates in medieval studies on the nature of subjectivity and identity, gender, the body, and sexuality, representation and power continue to operate from, or are conditioned by, the premises of this master paradigm” (Lees and Overing 1998, 315).

But I digress. For while I ultimately agree with Tirincula that we certainly should not be calling for any strict enforcement of the type of work Anglo-Saxonists ought to be doing, to act as if that is not already partly the case seems disingenuous. I could tell many anecdotes, but decline to do so out of professional propriety. But even a brief glance at the titles of papers presented at the biennial meetings of the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists—choose your year, any year, then look at them cumulatively if you have the time—reveals a lot about what the discipline of Anglo-Saxon studies would seem to either actively dismiss or set to the side: studies of gender, class, race, and sexuality; feminist and queer studies; Marxist and postcolonial studies; cultural studies (of the British or Benjaminian materialist type); post-processural archaeology; media and textuality theory; new or post-philology; semiotics and deconstruction; Foucauldian genealogy; psychoanalytic and cognitive approaches; political and sociological theory; nonlinear dynamics and systems theory; the theoretically roguish thought and schizoid-rhizomatic theory of Deleuze and Guattari and their ilk; postmodern hermeneutics; and any other number of other schools of post-structural thought and analysis as well as their significant “turns”—to language/discursivity, to the performative, to the body/embodiment, to space/habitus, to the Other/posthuman, to memory/spectrality, to reading/aesthetics, to ethics, to the animal, and to temporality.[11] Never mind presentism,[12] which represents the ultimate taboo, even in later medieval, and to a certain extent, early modern studies. This is just my way of saying, let’s not fool ourselves too much about how “fluid” or “adventurous” our disciplinary concerns are, a characterization that is, in any case, somewhat at odds with another of Tirincula’s assessments that I think is a more apt description of the field: Anglo-Saxon studies as a countercultural “refuge” from “the normal disciplinary divisions of the university.”

This is not at all to say that some very interesting work is not currently being done in Anglo-Saxon studies (say, from the mid-1990s onward) that takes up one or more of the schools and “turns” of thought listed above,[13] but as one of the editors of The Postmodern Beowulf, I can say here with some amount of authority (I hope) that, while much that could be called theoretically daring was on the horizon in the early 1990s, over fifteen years later, while I can hear some lone voices in the wilderness, I detect no serious “second wave,” especially among the younger scholars where I would expect to find it, and the “first wave,” at backward glance, now appears to have been somewhat of a bracing parley without a volley. When surveying the scholarship on Beowulf of the last twenty or so years that could be said to take up one or more postmodern bends of thought, my collaborators and I found that the majority of that kind of work had been accomplished primarily in the early to mid-1990s by scholars who would now (and partly then, also) be considered in their middle to later careers, such as Allen Frantzen, John Hill, John Niles, Seth Lerer, Nicholas Howe, James Earl, Marijane Osborn, Carol Braun Pasternack, Helen Bennett, Janet Thormann, Gillian Overing, and Clare Lees (Jane Chance should be given a nod here for her groundbreaking work on the poem in her 1986 book Woman as Hero in Anglo-Saxon Literature). Who, we asked ourselves, when gathering together the table of contents, would represent the younger generation most influenced by Frantzen’s call, in Desire for Origins, to develop a Beowulf studies that would “seek” its future “outside the Department of English and outside the rigid limits of language study, literary criticism, and history that contain them” (Frantzen 1990, 225), or most inspired by Niles’s idea, expressed in his Introduction to A Beowulf Handbook, that Old English studies should be situated within contemporary theoretical paradigms that would help us to investigate how Old English literary works, such as Beowulf, “shape the present-day culture that calls them to mind as artifacts” (Niles 1997, 9)? We put our collective ears to the ground, and we heard . . . some small tapping.

Along these same lines, I was a little disappointed when reading John Hill’s recent survey essay, “Current Trends in Beowulf Studies,” where his main intention is to provide “a review of the literary-critical work” he has “found most influential in the past fifteen years or so, work likely to stimulate further study . . . and thus become the key inspirers of Beowulf criticism into the near future” (Hill 2007, 66). Hill notes that recent scholarship has made many Beowulfs: “the archaic Beowulf, the psychological Beowulf, the feminist Beowulf, the monster-studies Beowulf, the oral-traditional Beowulf with its political and ethnogenetic implications, the moral Beowulf, and the comical Beowulf,” as well as the “dragon-inhabited” Beowulf (Hill 2007, 69).[14] But throughout his essay, Hill damns with faint praise much of what he terms influential and critically inspiring, such that Overing’s treatment of women in Beowulf in her book cited above is “interesting but anthropologically innocent”; Catherine Carsley, in her essay “Reassessing Cultural Memory in Beowulf,” apparently regrettably takes up “assumptions about how to value and thus read the poem’s presentation of revenge-feud, as a jural institution, [that] are distinctly twentieth-century ones”; Nida-Louise Surber-Meyer, in her Gift and Exchange in the Anglo-Saxon Poetic Corpus, “treats dramatic and lexical context superficially” and her discussion is “often fragmented, even sometimes misguided”; Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s treatment of Grendel in the poem, as a kind of “reified Otherness,” while “interesting,” is also “overly tenuous, connected to the poem’s contextual articulations only by such opaque strands as Grendel’s genealogy, his invasion of Heorot, and his watery habitat”; while “much” of Jennifer Neville’s “Monsters and Criminals: Defining Humanity in Old English Poetry” makes “good sense,” she “does not treat the monsters in the poem carefully within their highly differentiated contexts”; James Hala’s Kristevan reading of Grendel’s mother, in his essay, “The Parturition of Poetry and the Birthing of Culture: The ides aglæcwif and Beowulf,” is “[a]n ingenious but overwrought set of speculations”; Mary-Dockray Miller’s analysis of Hrothgar, in her essay “Beowulf’s Tears of Fatherhood,” as an “effeminate Other” in relation to Beowulf, “sorts well with a body of criticism that sees Hrothgar as weak,” but “because we have so little heroic poetry we cannot take Hrothgar’s emotionalism as evidence of a breakdown into effeminacy,” and further, in her book Motherhood and Mothering in Anglo-Saxon England, Dockray-Miller’s readings are “new, well-argued and nicely documented, although the conditioning emphasis on a heroic world of violence is often too speculative and sharp, thus insufficiently nuanced” (Hill 2007, 70, 73, 74, 76, 76–77, 77, 79). Intentionally or not, Hill gives pride of place to the “non-modern, aesthetic presuppositions, and compositional methods that might underlie Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Hiberian art and poetry” by concluding his essay with a look at the mathematical and geometric scholarship on Beowulf of Robert Stevick and David Howlett.

But again, I digress, because it is not my intention in this essay to start making a tally of who is or is not undertaking this or that type of postmodern Anglo-Saxon studies, or of whether or not such studies have become mainstream or remain marginal within the field, or have been readily accepted or damned with faint praise or outright condemned, such that I might be able to make some sort of pronouncement about the current state of the field with regard to the acceptance or rejection of the use of particular critical theories. I leave that work to those who like to make lists and formulate statistics (although, at the same time, do we really need statistics to tell us what we already know: Anglo-Saxon studies does often police the boundaries of its discipline). Nor do I want to make some kind of general call—as Frantzen did in the early 1990s—for all Anglo-Saxonists to embrace, in some fashion, cultural studies and poststructural thought (while also continuing to hone the traditional yet still richly rewarding paths of source and manuscript and language study); indeed, I am ultimately for “free choice” and for a field that would openly and warmly take all comers, regardless of their individual desires to “use” the field for traditional and/or non-traditional critico-scholarly ends. My own vision and hope for the field, which I will elaborate on further down, is one in which all types of work—philology, source study, codicology, textual editing, theory, etc.—would be affectively embraced by all who work under the sign of “Anglo-Saxon England,” and there would be a radical openness as regards the possibilities of what each scholar’s labors could contribute to our (truly) collective work. But my larger concern here has to do with the issue of disciplinarity more broadly, and how those who consider themselves Anglo-Saxonists perceive the future of our field in relation to the horizons of an increasingly threatened humanities. Obviously, specialization in a somewhat narrowly defined area, such as Old English or Old Norse poetry, will have to serve as a necessary precondition to a stake in a university appointment and for participation as an expert in the field of premodern studies (and yes, specialized expertise matters and Anglo-Saxonists have that in spades), but whether or not English or other departments will continue to value premodern studies in general will depend to a large extent on our willingness to expand the horizons of what we believe is our period of concern (500, give or take, to 1066 C.E. England?), and even, to completely dismantle the temporal lines that separate “what we do” from “what they do,” whoever “they” are: the intellectual historians of modern France or eastern Europe, the specialists in cyberpunk literature, the queer theorists, the contemporary poets and printmakers and painters, the physicists and computer scientists, the philosophers of mind, the social and political theorists, the evolutionary biologists, etc.

In his second post, “Again with the State of the Field,” Drout agrees with Tirincula that it is “a really intellectually exciting time to be an Anglo-Saxonist, with new areas for study opening up,” but at the same time, he is “not at all sanguine about the future of the field,” mainly because of what he sees as more and more English departments eliminating early medieval studies in favor of later periods or different specialties. As a result, Drout feels that Anglo-Saxonists “are like a species that’s healthy, genetically diverse and parasite free but whose habitat is being rapidly destroyed” (Drout 2007a). To those who might blame bad pedagogy (formerly compulsory courses in Old English taught poorly), lousy teaching instruments (such as, in Drout’s words, “the craptastic Clark-Hall dictionary, grammar books aimed at students who have had four years of Latin and Greek, etc.”), or the refusal of Anglo-Saxonists to engage with literary theory (Allen Frantzen’s argument in Desire for Origins), Drout adds that what might have even more to do with the purposeful shoving off of our discipline is that, “for those of our colleagues who know how we work, philology and the kinds of historical criticism that Anglo-Saxonists do is an irritating rebuke to standard dogma.” At the same time, “far too many of our colleagues (and even more of their students) really have very little idea of what we do because they are appallingly ignorant about language,” and therefore, while some in our departments “can go on about Otherness, etc. . . . they have no idea how actual language works”—semantic shifts, phonological change, the influence of Old Norse on English, and the like (Drout 2007a). Since English majors, according to Drout, are declining in numbers, regardless of English programs’ efforts to broaden the canon, diversify faculty, and focus more on contemporary literatures, “something different” needs to happen, and in Drout’s mind that “something different” would be to renew our focus “on language and how it works in a historical sense rather than in an abstract philosophical sense” (Drout 2007a). Because, in Drout’s mind, literary studies “suffer” from always being pulled toward either solipsism or politics, a more serious engagement with language and linguistics could help us “to argue to parents, legislators, and critics that what we do is valuable not just in terms of some kind of nebulous ‘critical thinking,’ but in really specific terms” (Drout 2007a). But unless our studies can be argued to have something to do with the development of professional careers, I’m not sure parents and legislators will ever be interested, nor do I fully understand how the study of language could ever be completely lifted out of certain socio-philosophical contexts (is not the practice of history itself a type of philosophy, even an art? can any academic discipline, including linguistics, ever be completely free of philosophy or theorizing? is language study really a science practiced with “right and wrong answers”?), but let’s leave those questions aside for the moment.

In response to Drout’s and Tirincula’s posts, Richard Scott Nokes wrote a post on his blog Unlocked Wordhoard, “More on the State of the Field,” in which he argues that the real “problem” with our field “is that we have abandoned literature” in favor of “philosophy-lite and history-lite.” Instead of conversations about Beowulf or other Old English poetry, we spend “more time talking about Kristeva and Spivak,” and we have further forgotten, in our pursuit of old and new historicist readings “that history is situated IN LANGUAGE” (Nokes 2007a). So, essentially, we should attend to language and let the philosophy and history departments attend to what they know better than we do. In another post clarifying his initial thoughts, “A Day Late and 99¢ Short,” Nokes writes that “the use of history should be optional” in the interpretation of literature, primarily because “language pre-dates history,” and therefore history is situated in language and not the other way around (Nokes 2007b). While he is quick to point out that he is “not saying that we can learn nothing from the situatedness of language,” what he does want to say is that the idea is “overrated for its ability to help us understand,” and he is much more interested “in those elements of language that are not contingent upon situation, the things that used to be called ‘universals’” (Nokes 2007b). Drout mainly agrees with Nokes, but also avers that he doesn’t “actually see how one could have language analysis without history”; nevertheless, “other disciplines should be subordinate to what we should be able to do best: analyze language, narrative and culture in ways that are not easily accessible to political scientists, sociologists, or philosophers,” because “[o]ur game should be played on our home field” (Drout 2007b).

In my own initial response to these musings of Drout’s and Nokes’s, “My Life Among the Anglo-Saxonists: More Anomie, Despair, and Self-Immolation,” posted on the group medieval studies weblog In The Middle, I suggested that these sorts of arguments appear to exercise the either/or fallacy—either we’re language study experts who “get” literature, history, and culture on a deep, structural level that is somehow inaccessible to the modernists, or we are postmodern theorists pretending to know things about literature, history, and culture we can’t possibly know if we’re not language experts first—as if somehow we are not always both, or that someone who has a firm grasp of Old Norse is therefore better suited to understand the contemporary novels of Peter Hoeg (they might not be), or that someone who might not know Old English or Latin or Old Norse can’t possibly understand (or hope to know well) the poetry of Wallace Stevens or the politics of race and gender and sexuality at play in the oeuvre of Toni Morrison, never mind in the Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records. Under the dictums proffered by Drout and Nokes, can Morrison even hope to understand Morrison?[15]

To Drout’s claim that the discipline of philology “has, since Grimm (and maybe even since Rask and Bopp), built up a great deal of knowledge that is valuable exactly because is not contingent and situated in any meaningful sense” (Drout 2007a), I expressed in my post that language is situated—first and foremost in human bodies, which are themselves always situated somewhere, and I will say here that that “somewhere” is history itself, and more largely, the material world within which everything is, on some level, interconnected. I have always told my students that a dictionary is the last place they should go to understand the meaning of terms such as love, friendship, justice, revenge, morality, human, and the like (for they will only find words pointing to other words, which will not ultimately reveal to them the myriad ways in which different persons in different times and places negotiate and use and understand these—not words, exactly—but states of being and action), and it discomfits me to think that, as an Anglo-Saxonist, what I should be telling them is that English, understood properly from the perspective of the right dictionaries and linguistic “laws,” provides “right and wrong answers.” But what are the questions? Yes, I know a really good historical dictionary, such as Toronto’s Old English Dictionary, provides me with rich and invaluable information as to the use of certain Old English words in certain Anglo-Saxon manuscripts, from which relations I can deduce some useful information about Anglo-Saxon thought and life and the use of language in relation to that thought and life, but it will only ever be a partial picture, a mere scratching on the surface of a history long lost to us except in its ruins and fragments: the “left behind,” as it were. To say, further, that history is situated in language, as Nokes does, may capture something of the fact that the disciplinary practice of history is, essentially, a language and narrative art (it most decidedly is so), but history, understood more broadly as the things that happen every day (now and in the past), both with and without our notice of them, has a material existence that may or may not originate in language or even in a human consciousness structured, pace Chomsky and Lacan, like a grammar or a language.

I am not born with a full-blown language and multiple vocabularies, but must learn (or at least, following Chomsky, generate) these in my traffic with the world, which is not always verbal. Recent discoveries in the cognitive sciences are making more and more clear how important embodiment is to consciousness, and therefore, also to language.[16] Furthermore, the science and philosophy of complexity and emergence are demonstrating in powerful ways that nothing is really fully separate from anything else.[17] And I would argue that trying to pretend that the study of language can be accomplished in some sort of room that is separate from or pre-adjacent to politics, history, or philosophy, while at the same time arguing that language study is indispensable to understanding those realms, is like saying I can separate my head from my body in order to better study my brain, which will then allow me to fully explain what a human being (composed of body plus world plus temporality) is. It has always been too easy to poke holes in the sometimes absurdist claims of poststructural thought, which may or may not be well articulated in language that could be called linguistically or historically precise, and then turn around and argue that, if the language (or knowledge of history) is imprecise, then the ideas must be bogus. But why bother beating up on straw men or getting upset when Foucault, pace Deleuze and Guattari, praises “difference over uniformity, flows over unity, [and] mobile arrangements over systems” (Foucault 1983, xiii), since science has already made clear, in much more rigorous fashion, that our mind, and therefore our understanding of our experiences—both current and historical—is not a “unified, homogeneous unity, nor even . . . a collection of entities,” but is rather, “a disunified, heterogeneous, collection of processes” (Varela, Thompson and Rosch 1991, 100)?

But perhaps even better answers to Drout’s and Nokes’s claims that some knowledge is not contingent or situated and that an important move for the self-preservation of Anglo-Saxon studies might be to at least privilege language study first before anything else (with the understanding that language study partakes in something like universal or pragmatic facts or truths), come from three graduate students in medieval studies, Liza Blake (New York University), Mary Kate Hurley (Columbia University), and John Walter (Saint Louis University), two of whom (Blake and Walter) appended comments to my blog post, cited above, “My Life Among the Anglo-Saxonists.”[18] Blake referenced Deleuze’s idea that, “when questioning something’s identity,” you should replace “intrinsic essences by active transformations. In this new system, [in the words of Manuel DeLanda, from Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy,] ‘figures are classified by their response to events that occur to them’” (qtd. in Joy 2007). Of her own struggles to identify herself as a scholar, Blake wrote further,

If there’s anything I learned in undergrad[uate] and graduate school, as I slowly and awkwardly came to “identify” myself as a scholar of literature, it is that I’m not mastering an area by difference (I do _____ while philosophy does philosophy and linguistics does language), but mastering an ability to sense—and provide for—when a text needs more historical analyses and when it asks for philosophical analyses (insert various “icals” here). In short . . . I would identify myself not by what I do, buy by how the texts I read transform my scholarly work, and transform what it means for me to be (or become—I’ve got a long way to go yet) a scholar. (Qtd. in Joy 2007)

In another comment, Walter reminded us that “the problem with claims that all we need to do is focus on ‘x’ is that X gets its meaning from its relationships to everything that’s not X,” and he indicated that he “liked Walter Ong’s take on what English studies is,” as evidenced by an essay Ong wrote in 1971, “English 2000 A.D.,” where Ong ruminated:

I suspect that at its best English in the future will continue to develop by reaching out and pulling in around itself as many as possible of the other always burgeoning humanistic subjects (including the sciences in their manifold humanistic dimensions). . . . Perhaps the end result will be the emergence of a multidisciplinary field of study, which we can hope will not be invincibly chaotic and which we might be styled anthropology in the deepest sense of this term, with various foci, these for English being around the verbally produced artifact. (Ong 1971, 11)

Finally, in a memorial piece, “In Memoriam: Nicholas Howe,” written for In The Middle, Hurley ruminated on her experience of re-reading Howe’s book Across an Inland Sea: Writing in Place from Buffalo to Berlin, which Hurley believes teaches us “as much about being a medievalist as it does about being a traveler” (Hurley 2006). She explained the ways in which Howe’s book, although it is not ostensibly about Anglo-Saxon England, resonates with the themes that predominated Howe’s work with Old English texts: “the idea and construction of home, and the ways in which the loss of that home inscribes itself in a place, and moreover in writing” (Hurley 2006). And she also pointed out how Howe also directly invokes the ruins of Old English elegy—its enta geweorc—in relation to places such as an abandoned train station in Buffalo, New York or High Street in Columbus, Ohio. Most importantly, Hurley highlighted Howe’s insights in his book regarding the temporal paradoxes of pilgrimage and pilgrimage sites, which in my mind could stand as an apt description of the exemplary (and may I say, beautiful?) way in which Howe approached the study of the Anglo-Saxon world in his scholarship. As Howe himself puts it,

[t]he return enacted by pilgrimage need not be—perhaps rarely is—within one’s own experience or life; it is more powerfully a return within commonly shared practices and memories. . . . A pilgrimage site endures in the life of a person paradoxically as a place of transience. You journey there, you are there, and then you leave. . . . But from that pilgrim’s place comes some understanding that it is not transient and fixes it in memory so it can be found again. (Howe 2003, 114)

This idea of traveling to the past via the well-trod paths to ancient sites where, in the face of the “stony reticence” of those sites, “words should fail us” (Howe 2003, 139), and by which traveling there is both permanence but also the continual transience of going and coming back, captures beautifully, for me, an ideal praxis for Anglo-Saxon studies—a praxis, moreover, that would always understand the importance of the return to the present because, as Hurley explained Howe’s thinking regarding his journey to Chartres, “in our time a pilgrimage site exists only as it is made and remade through the desire of each visitor” (Hurley 2006), and Chartres is ultimately a ruin for us, not just in its decayed architecture, but because, in Howe’s own words, we “do not visit it as a place of worship” (Howe 2003, 116). In this sense, situatedness is all, and we will always arrive belatedly to the primary love object of our studies—Anglo-Saxon England—carrying other histories with us that can’t but help inflect our thought and affect, and why would we want to discard them? We do not reach backwards, facing away from the present, through orderly chains of words and significations to understand the past on its own (supposedly logical and rational and coherent) terms, but can only feel our way there through the rubble of what I would call these affective remains of the past, these letters to the future, or, in the words of Edith Wyschogrod, these “gift[s] of the past to a present affected with futurity,” which are inscribed “with the vouloir dire of a people that has been silenced, of the dead others” (Wyschogrod 1998, 248). It is not the so-called “science” of language and manuscript studies, but the art of the affective intelligence that can hope to help us draw close to these dead others, and to consider both their silence and the ruins of their words, while also imagining the possibilities of contact, of reanimation. For after all, as Catherine Brown has written, the Middle Ages “was invented to be a foreign country. The indigenous peoples are dead, and they didn’t even know they were medieval—they thought they were living in modern times. They thought it was now” (Brown 2000, 547).

And here we begin to hit on what, for me, is the real heart of the matter: the necessity of a scholarly affect of openness with regard to the possible interrelations (or in Walter Benjamin’s terms, the possible constellations)[19] between an Anglo-Saxon text (a verbal, but also a visual, and yes, an archaeological-anthropological artifact) and, frankly, almost anything else that might lie in our path of pilgrimage to the past and back again. And with Blake’s commentary above, especially, we have what I think is the critically important idea that, for all of our training and possible critical biases or leanings, and for all of the ways in which the artifacts of the past are, of course, somehow fixed in both memory and in historical spaces and times, we must allow ourselves to be surprised and led by what we do not know about them—by all the ways in which a text could ask us questions we had not thought to ask ourselves as part of our traditional preparation for sitting down with an Old English poem, or homily, or saint’s legend, or set of law codes, or the like, if only we were willing to suspend certain habituations. As James Earl has asked of Beowulf, “What would Beowulf look like if we could see it ‘without feeling much previous history’? What would it look like stripped of everything we have been taught about it, as if it had just washed up onto our shore and we were reading it for the very first time?” (Earl 2007, 688). This would entail a reconceptualization of our reading practices, pace Paul Zumthor, as, “at least potentially, a dialogue,” in which

two agents confront one another: I am in some way produced by this text, and in the same moment, as a reader, I construct it. A relationship of active solidarity rather than a mirror-effect; solidarity promised rather than given, pleasurably felt at the end of the long preparatory work required by the traversing of two historical distances, going and coming back. (Zumthor 1986, 66)

And I think we have to also give ourselves permission and the time to wander at will, or by accident, through the fields and thickets of other disciplines and realms of thought and places (whether a city or movie theater or genetics lab) that lie off the beaten paths of our disciplinary tradition: how else could Howe have connected an abandoned train station in a contemporary American city to the ruins built by giants in the Anglo-Saxon landscapes of Old English poetry? To say then, as Drout ultimately does, that what Anglo-Saxon studies needs now is a renewed focus on philology, historicism, and manuscript work, in order to resist the “pull” of a literary studies that would be too personal or too political or too much like “the dorm room bull session” (Drout 2007a), strikes me as an impoverished view of what our field should be and do. It is a view that does not seem to understand that the texts of Anglo-Saxon England, “far from being a rigid tablet of fixed rules and monuments bullying us from the past,” in every moment of their reading and interpretation, actually reveal history “as an agonistic process still being made, rather than finished and settled once and for all” (Said 2004, 25). The perspective (whoever is espousing it) that Anglo-Saxon studies should turn away from postmodern literary studies is also myopic—of a piece with Dr. P’s visual agnosia—as regards the future of the humanities and the part that Anglo-Saxon studies might play (must play) in that. It should give us pause, further, that while many Anglo-Saxonists are still actively resisting and dismissing critical theory, during the symposium of the editorial board of Critical Inquiry convened in 2003 to discuss the future of the journal, critical theory, and the humanities, Teresa de Lauretis argued that “now may be a time for the human sciences to reopen the questions of subjectivity, materiality, discursivity, knowledge, to reflect on the post of posthumanity. It is a time to break the piggy bank of saved conceptual schemata and reinstall uncertainty in all theoretical applications, starting with the primacy of the cultural and its many ‘turns’: linguistic, discursive, performative, therapeutic, ethical, you name it” (de Lauretis 2004, 368). Then again, this could mark the perfect time for the entry of Anglo-Saxon studies as the “pre” of everything (English) into the larger (and pressing) project of considering the “post” of everything (English). This is a project already ongoing in many quarters, and in a system of higher education—the University—that can, at this point, be considered posthistorical.

In his book The University in Ruins, published two years after his untimely death in 1994, Bill Readings argued (convincingly, in my mind) that, partly due to “globalization,” whereby “the rule of the cash nexus” has replaced “the notion of national identity as a determinant in all aspects of social life,” the University (capitalized to indicate its historical status as an idealized institution) has become a “transnational bureaucratic corporation” and “the centrality of the traditional humanistic disciplines to the life of the University is no longer assured” (Readings 1996, 3). Because “the grand narrative of the University, centered on the production of a liberal, reasoning subject, is no longer available to us,” it is “no longer the case that we can conceive the University within the historical horizon of its self-realization” (Readings 1996, 9, 5). Readings prefers the term “posthistorical” over “postmodern” for the contemporary University “in order to insist on the sense that the institution has outlived itself, is now a survivor of the era in which it defined itself in terms of the project of the historical development, affirmation, and inculcation of national culture” (Readings 1996, 6). Ultimately, the University is “a ruined institution, one that lost its historical raison d’etre,” but which nevertheless “opens up a space in which it is possible to think the notion of community otherwise, without recourse to notions of unity, consensus, and communication” (Readings 1996, 19, 20). This is a space, moreover, where the University “becomes one site among others where the question of being-together is raised, raised with an urgency that proceeds from the absence of the institutional forms (such as the nation-state), which have historically served to mask that question” (Readings 1996, 20). Indeed, the University, however “ruined,” must strive, in Readings’ view, toward building a “community that is not made up of subjects but singularities”: this community would not be “organic in that its members do not share an immanent identity to be revealed,” and it would not be “directed toward the production of a universal subject of history, to the cultural realization of an essential human nature” (Readings 1996, 185). Rather, this would be a community “of dissensus that presupposes nothing in common,” and that “would seek to make its heteronomy, its differences, more complex” (Readings 1996, 190). In this scenario, the posthistorical University would be “where thought takes place beside thought, where thinking is a shared process without identity or unity”—this is ultimately “a dissensual process; it belongs to dialogism rather than to dialogue,” and instead of a new interdisciplinary space that would “reunify” the increasingly fragmented disciplines, there would be a “shifting disciplinary structure that holds open the question of whether and how thoughts fit together” (Readings 1996, 192).

Readings’ thinking accords well with Derrida’s in his essay, “The University Without Condition,” where Derrida argued for a “new humanities” and “unconditional university” that would “remain an ultimate place of critical resistance—and more than critical—to all the powers of dogmatic and unjust appropriation” (Derrida 2002, 204). This unconditional university, further, would constitute “the principal right to say everything, even if it be under the heading of fiction and the experimentation of knowledge, and the right to say it publicly, to publish it” (Derrida 2002, 205). Finally, the humanities

would have a privileged place in this unconditional university, because the very principle of unconditionality
has an originary and privileged place of presentation, of manifestation, of safekeeping in the Humanities. It has there its space of discussion and reelaboration as well. All this passes as much by way of literature and languages (that is, the sciences called the sciences of man and culture) as by way of the nondiscursive arts, by way of law and philosophy, by way of critique, questioning, and, beyond critical philosophy and questioning, by way of deconstruction—where it is a matter of nothing less than rethinking the concept of man, the figure of humanity in general, and singularly the one presupposed by what we have called, in the university, for the last few centuries, the Humanities. (Derrida 2002, 207)

Here, then, I ask for an Anglo-Saxon studies without conditions—for the right, as an Anglo-Saxonist, “to say everything, even if it be under the heading of fiction and the experimentation of knowledge, and the right to say it publicly, to publish it.” I ask, too, for a shared vision of the University as the site of the “shifting disciplinary structure that holds open the question of whether and how [our] thoughts fit together.”

But it is not enough to say I want these things or to ask for them—after all, Drout himself has said that he has “no interest” in telling Anglo-Saxonists “what they should be interested in” (Drout 2007c). But it is not a question of interest—what I am interested in (the “queerness” and nonlinear dynamics and schizoid “flows” of the Anglo-Latin Guthlac narratives, at present) versus what you might be interested in (the sources of Ælfric’s Lives of Saints or the metrics of Beowulf, perhaps?). It is, rather, a question of collective desire. There must be room, in my mind, within Anglo-Saxon studies, not just for the individual scholar who wishes to take herself into uncharted theoretical territory (to go and come back again as a lone traveler), but for deleuzoguattarian roaming packs and multiplicities to emerge and join with other packs and multiplicities to create desiring-scholarly-machines and critical machine-machine-machine-machines. This would be, in the words of Jeffrey Cohen and Todd Ramlow, a “process formed of alliances with and through [disciplinary] others, a process not collapsible to either side of a self/other binary, a process always in motion, changing (performatively) in multiple contexts” (Cohen and Ramlow 2005/2006). These alliances would be made up of groups of scholar-machines (an Anglo-Saxon studies machine, a queer theory machine, a post-Norman Conquest history machine, a third-wave feminist studies machine, etc.), each of which would function as “a break in the flow, in relation to the machine connected to it,” and everywhere there would be “break-flows out of which desire” would pour forth (Deleuze and Guattari 1983, 37). Ours would then be field (or machine) that would have to run on the libidinal economies of the philologist as well as the queer theorist, the codicologist as well as the new historicist, and so on. I want, further, to see working groups formed across the temporal divides that separate Anglo-Saxon studies from the “other” Middle Ages and beyond, in which groups Anglo-Saxonists would take leadership positions (while also practicing anti-hierarchical collaborative work) and the primary impetus for the disparate “joinings” of these groups would be nothing less than a complete re-envisioning of the humanities and its relation to public thought and life.

This would be the only possible route, in my mind, toward the kind of schizoid desiring-revolution that Deleuze and Guttari argued for so passionately in their collaborative work, where desire itself, when it lights out for the territories elsewhere unleashes, in the words of one of their translators, “schizzes-flows—forces that escape coding, scramble the codes, and flee in all directions: orphans (no daddy-mommy-me), atheists (no beliefs), and nomads (no habits, no territories)” (Seem 1983, xxi]. Such a revolution will be necessary to reinvent the “business as usual,” not just of Anglo-Saxon studies, but also of the transnational bureaucratic corporation called the University which has created a culture of cynicism and despair as regards the fate of the humanities. But I—I do not despair. If it turns out that assembling a pack, or multiplicity, of theoretical rogues within Anglo-Saxon studies is not possible at present, I will leave this house and carry these studies to other territories and other packs. It has been my feeling for some time now, in any case, that what might be called the University proper—at least in terms of its brick and stone buildings and manicured green spaces and conventional classrooms and libraries and departments rooted in fixed geographies—is no longer adequate to the project of a humanities that could be said to matter somehow, not just now, but in the future. We may need new affectively-constructed spaces, or floating intellectual “cells” or “group houses” or “undergrounds,” that would be global and heterogeneous, always on the move, and perpetually committed to asking the question of what “being-together” means. This is not an academic question, but a political one. There is no escaping it.

Endnotes

Works Cited

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Benjamin, Walter. 1969. Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books.

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Biddick, Kathleen. 1998. The Shock of Medievalism. Durham: Duke University Press.

Blackmore, Susan. 1999. The Meme Machine. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Brown, Catherine. 2000. “In the Middle.” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 30.3: 547–74.

Burger, Glenn and Steven F. Kruger, eds. 2001. Queering the Middle Ages. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Cannon, Christopher J. 2007. The Grounds of English Literature, 1006-1330. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

- - - . 2005. “Between the Old and the Middle of English.” New Medieval Literatures 7: 203–21.

Chance, Jane. 1986. Woman as Hero in Anglo-Saxon Literature. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press.

Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. 2003. Medieval Identity Machines. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome, ed. 2000. The Postcolonial Middle Ages. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome and Todd Ramlow. 2005/2006. “Pink Vectors of Deleuze: Queer Theory and Inhumanism.” Rhizomes 11/12: http://www.rhizomes.net/ issue11/cohenramlow.html.

DeLanda, Manuel. 2006. A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity. London and New York: Continuum International Publishing.

- - - . 2000. A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History. Cambridge, Mass.: Zone Books.

de Lauretis, Teresa. 2004. “Statement Due.” Critical Inquiry 30.2: 365–68.

Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. 1983. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Dendle, Peter. 2001. Satan Unbound: The Devil in Old English Narrative Literature. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Derrida, Jacques. 2002. “The University Without Condition.” In Jacques Derrida, Without Alibi. Ed. and trans. Peggy Kamuf. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 2002–37.

Dinshaw, Carolyn. 1999. Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Postmodern. Durham: Duke University Press.

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